("Hard Workers" by Atsuyuki Ohshima)

The Comedy Pet Photography competition is brought to you by the same people who stage the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, except these are for domestic animals that live with us. The finalists for this year's competition have been released, and they are both goofy and adorable. No wonder we keep these wonderful creatures as pets!

("Who are you" by Silvia Jiang)

The finalists include funny facial expressions caught at just the right time, animal interactions that tell a story, and pets who dance like no one is watching. Except someone is, with a camera.

("I think I saw a mouse" by Debby Thomas)

See all 29 finalists in a gallery here. You can vote on your favorite for the People's Choice Award, which also gets you entered into a sweepstakes drawing for £100 cash. The winners of the Pet Comedy Photography Awards will be announced on June 6. You can see more comedic pets in the other entries at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort

Now wait just a minute here. Why is Screen Junkies making an Honest Trailer for a movie that came out, uh, 25 years ago? Oh, I see. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace opened on May 16, 1999, which means its silver anniversary is tomorrow. That's why you've been seeing references to The Phantom Menace everywhere, and it may even be playing at a theater near you.

This movie heralded the second phase of Star Wars, now called "the prequels." Fans who saw the original Star Wars movie in 1977 as children had been waiting 16 years for another glimpse at a galaxy far, far away and had their hopes sky high for The Phantom Menace, but then were disappointed. At the same time, children who were introduced to that world in 1999 loved it. Twenty-five years later, those children run the world, and they have fond memories of The Phantom Menace. Do you realize the implications of this conundrum? In another twenty years, Star Wars fans across the internet will be lauding the nostalgic feel of The Rise of Skywalker. But for now, let's wallow in the memories of the annoying child prodigy Anakin Skywalker, endless discussion of trade agreements, midi-chlorians, and Jar Jar Binks.   

We've all had the experience of signing up for something on the internet and tearing our hair out trying to get through the process because they put so little effort into making it easy for the user. At a regular website, you'd just give up in frustration and never go to that site again, but bad interface is rampant at government websites where you have to get in somehow to do everything from getting health insurance to paying your utility bill. What if someone put all the complaints about bad user interface in one place so that you can drive yourself mad? Then no one would use it. But what if they made it a game?

User Inyerface is just such a game. You are challenged to register an account in the most difficult ways possible, and you have to figure out all its quirks yourself because you can't complain to a form. There's a help box, but that's hilariously bad, too. It's more like a puzzle, and it's really satisfying when you get all the way through. Oh yeah, and you're timed as well. It took me twenty-two minutes, but don't let that discourage you. I had a phone call while playing, and I sure didn't want to start over again just for a better time, and I certainly didn't want to play through a second time just to get a screenshot for this post. There's no need to use your real information in the game. User Inyerface can be described as amusing and annoying at the same time, because we know we will run into these poorly-designed components the next time we want to signup for a state park membership or something. -via Metafilter

"Pull my finger."

In Germany, this request usually has a different connotation. The Associated Press tells us that fingerhakeln is a traditional sport from southern Germany and the alpine region of Austria.

Two men face each other across a table and place their middle fingers through a leather loop. Then they try to pull each other across the table. Fingerhakeln requires a lot of strength--sometimes enough to dislocate an opponent's finger.

Last Sunday, 150 men gathered in a beer tent in Bernbeuren, Germany to compete. Approximately 1,000 spectators watched the athletes, who were dressed in traditional clothing, pull against each other in successive rounds until a champion prevailed.

-via Dave Barry

Someone call a carpenter, because there is obviously something very wrong with the stairs leading off the concert stage! When someone falls down a flight of stairs in real life, we might hear plenty of banging and screaming, often resulting in injuries, and there's nothing funny about it. When singers with distinctive and iconic voices fall down the stairs, everyone knows who they are. Master mixer Dustin Ballard, better known as There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), shows us what that might sound like. He assures us that no singers were hurt in the making of this nonsense. Each fall is mercifully short, but still paints a picture in our minds. You almost feel sorry for the singer, fictional as this scenario is. You have to wonder what inspired this project, because it can't have been good. My guess is that Steven Tyler was the original inspiration, but Johnny Cash makes it perfect.

The 1975 movie Jaws was based on the 1974 bestselling novel by Peter Benchley, but to make the film, Steven Spielberg had to condense, adapt, and flesh out the visuals. For research, he went to the Shark Lab at Cal State, founded by marine biologist Dr. Donald “Reef” Nelson. Spielberg was impressed by Nelson's knowledge -and his office, which served as the inspiration for that of the movie's marine biologist character Matt Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss. Nelson was hired as a consultant on both Jaws and Jaws II.

Dr. Nelson became an expert on sharks from swimming with them for years before Jaws became a blockbuster hit. But he learned so much more about sharks afterward that he regretted the way the movie portrayed the great white shark, which he considered a disservice to the fish and to sharks in general. Read about the life and research of Reef Nelson at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Bruce)

When a parent or partner calls you by a pet name, they are either trying to be exclusive and intimate, or else they can't recall what your name is. You know which one it is. People use odd terms of endearment in all languages all over the world. The variety of pet names is huge, and the most common have to do with sweet foods. That makes sense, because it's what people like and crave. There are also pet names that imply smallness or cuteness, or even monetary value. People also have pet names that make no sense at all to outsiders because they are based on a shared experience from long ago.  

Our favorite linguist, Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) goes over the universality of pet names, the different kinds that have proved to be popular, and why we use them. The upshot is that my pet names for my loved ones are adorable and sweet, while your pet names for your loved ones are cringey. -via Laughing Squid

We don't know what this tiny ground spider calls itself. But we humans should refer to it by its official taxanomic identifier, which is Hotwheels sisyphus. It lives in southwestern China and is one of three recently classified ground spiders in that region of China.

ZooKeys informs us that it was named specifically for the Hot Wheels toys produced by Mattel bccause the coiled embolus (I think that's part of the legs) of the animal resembles a Hot Wheels track.

The Drive says that the Hotwheels sisyphus is noted for its "weird genitals," but I think that's getting a bit personal. I mean, how would you feel if people primarily thought of your genitalia when learning about you?

-via Super Punch

Surgeons have an intimate relationship with the human body, and particularly their patients' bodies. Their efforts are mainly to save their lives, but when a patient is dead, that relationship is broken. The surgeon can do nothing more for them. That was well understood until relatively recent medical breakthroughs made it necessary for dead patients to undergo surgery in order to donate their organs. An entirely new category of patient was designated for those who are brain dead, but their bodies must be kept going long enough to harvest those organs.

Author and anesthesiologist Ronald W. Dworkin takes us into that uncanny state as doctors attempt to slow the body's dying process and race to harvest organs that will be viable for saving other patients who need them. The procedures involved are unlike anything else those doctors do for their patients, and they are very aware of the gravity of the procedure, and how the body responds even when the mind is gone. They are also mindful of the deceased and the gift they are giving. Read about the overwhelming experience of performing exacting surgery on a somewhat functioning body with a dead brain at Aeon.  -via Nag on the Lake

The reason they call it fight choreography is because it's like a dance. And because it's like a dance, each cinematic fight has its own rhythm. However, a fair amount of these fight scenes you remember from your favorite movies have the same rhythm (if not, they will fix it in the edit), and here they are all fighting to the tune of "Pedro" by Raffaella Carrà (Jaxomy & Agatino Romero Remix). While this multifandom movie montage is pretty short, it contains multitudes of action from the heroes and villains you know so well. It will start your adrenaline flowing.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

In the age of printers, e-books, the Amazon marketplace, and expiring copyrights, it's really easy to sell a book that one didn't write, and there is no shortage of people taking advantage of the opportunity. Anyone can release a new copy of a literary classic that's in the public domain with very little work. But these rapidly-produced books need a cover. The workshops that spew out all these novels don't want to take too much time designing a cover, so they do a Google search for art that will illustrate some word in the title, whether the title has anything to do with the story or not. The result is a glut of hilariously bad covers for books you know and love, or else were forced to read in high school.  

You can bet your bottom dollar that the people who put these covers together have never read the book. They aren't even looking for good art, either, just easy art, like stock images, Photoshopped copies of things they've used before, or even something cooked up on Microsoft Paint. You'll get a laugh out of a collection of the worst covers called Public Domain Atrocities. If you want more, there are lists of covers here and here as well. And then there's this.  -via Metafilter

We look back at fashions of the past and wonder what they were thinking. A little research and some common sense tell us that high heels were developed to hold one's feet in the stirrups while riding a horse, but became common for women because it signified someone who doesn't do hard labor and stayed for good because they make women flex their leg and butt muscles attractively. The codpiece started out for reasons of modesty, but became popular as a way of showing off. But what was up with the ruffled collars of the Elizabethan era? They only look natural on Bozo the Clown. They served no practical use, and they certainly weren't comfortable. Weird History goes over the real purpose of ruffs, plus how the fashion changed to become more elaborately ridiculous over time, spread across the world, and eventually died out -except for clowns. But hey, we may wonder about the strange fashions of the past, yet those folks would look at our modern clothing the same way. 

The Boy Scouts of America organization is changing its name to Scouting America, as an attempt at rebranding and because they have 176,000 girls in their ranks. They will still have merit badges for certain achievements, as do the Girl Scouts. But why should these badges be limited to young folks? We learn and change throughout our lives. And there are certain accomplishments that mark the achievement of middle age. The badge above is called the Ceramics Class at the Local Community College Badge. You receive that when you realize that you were too busy building a career and raising kids for the past twenty years and now you don't have any hobbies, and that has to be fixed quickly.

Another is particularly relevant due to a popular post we had not too long ago. The Boombox Badge is to mark your accomplishment of admitting that "you don’t care about new music and start listening only to music that was awesome when you were fifteen." Oh sure, you can argue about that all day, but then you won't get the badge. See nine of these badges for the achievements of middle age at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Images credit: Jane Demarest)

Since 1977, kids have gathered at Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatres to eat technically edible pizza and play arcade games. Part of the background ambiance has been the animatronic band that company founder Nolan Bushnell developed somewhat by accident when he bought a rat costume thinking that it was a coyote costume. He then had engineers develop animatronics to make the rat costume move and named the resulting character Chuck E. Cheese.

Alongside other anthropomorphic animal band members collectively named Munch's Make Believe Band, Chuck E. Cheese sang original and cover songs when activated. Four decades of on-demand concerts followed. But now, the New York Times (sorry, paywalled article) reports that the company is shutting down the last of these animatronic features in Chuck E. Cheese restaurants.

Kids these days are more interested in screen-based entertainment rather than the robotics of the 1970s. Round the decay of that colossal wreck boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.

-via Dave Barry

Does a person have the right to end their own life when it is full of pain and incurable suffering? How about someone else's life? Modern medical miracles sometimes come with a horrific cost. We may be able to save lives that were once doomed, but if it leaves the patient with severe brain damage, in a coma, or in a vegetative state, what have we gained? We've gained some deep ethical and philosophical questions, like what is the minimum standard of a life worth living? In the case of Terri Schiavo, which you may recall from the turn of the century, a 26-year-old woman was left severely brain-damaged and in a vegetative state after a heart attack. Years later, her husband proposed removing her feeding tube, the only artificial life support technology Schiavo required. Her parents objected on the grounds that you don't stop feeding someone because they are disabled. The case dragged on for years, and eventually led to reviews of the laws around life support and death with dignity.

The ethical questions remain, though. You may believe it is okay to refuse life support or life-saving interventions, but not active euthanasia. But what if the patient is unable to express their wishes? What if the patient with a terminal illness or profound disabilities or untreatable pain really wants to end their suffering but needs assistance to carry out that wish? As medical science continues to extend life beyond our ability to enjoy it, these questions will only get more difficult.